It took only another ten minutes for the inevitable invasion. She didn’t even bother to turn when she heard the steps in the hallway.
“That was Priscilla Mayhew we just saw leaving out the back, wasn’t it?” her cousin Charlie said as she walked in.
Georgie nodded.
Her cousin Eddie followed on Charlie’s heels. “You are about to do something foolish,” she said, her voice nearly as soft as Priscilla’s. “Aren’t you?”
Georgie sighed and got to her feet to face her cohorts. “I very much fear I am.”
Charlie laughed. “Well, good. We got here just in time.”
2
The planning meeting commenced the next afternoon after the cousins had collected some vital information. Georgie was working on preparing the lesson on the Battle of Toulouse when the door opened.
“Do we have a plan yet?”
She looked up from her mother’s Chinoiserie desk to see her cousin Charlie standing in the doorway to the Chinese Salon. Obviously, time to put away the work she’d been doing for the work she needed to do. “Do I have my intelligence yet?”
Charlie strode in. “Eddie said she would meet us here. All I could get from my dance partners last night was that Greyville’s men adore him and won’t hear a bad word spoken against him.”
“Greyville?”
Charlie shrugged and began to stride about the room as if caught in a prison cell rather than one of the most opulent rooms in Clevedon House. “He prefers it to the new title. Says he’s not used to it yet. Actually, prefersGrey, but I am not that lost to good manners.”
Georgie turned back to her work, but she was grinning to herself. Charlie always moved as if she brought a strong windin with her. Georgie had always thought that this room should have been Charlie’s. The décor was exotic, the furniture shining mahogany, a hue that seemed positively tame compared with the red of Charlie’s hair, and the brilliant red silk wallpaper writhing with ornate dragons that seemed just about ready to incinerate the furniture, much as Charlie often did.
Perhaps it was the Breslin red hair from her mother’s side of the family, or the no-nonsense attitude of a girl brought up amid four brothers and a sportsman father, or the lightning quick mind that flared just as quickly to temper. But Charlie somehow matched the energy in this room.
“Well, think of something,” she said now as she plopped onto a scarlet silk settee, her orange muslin gown clashing violently with the scarlet material, which Georgie knew delighted Charlie no end. Georgie wagered that her cousin would stay right there until one of the other adults came in to catch her and all but collapsed in horror. “I’m bored.”
“How can you be bored?” Georgie asked absently, collecting the newspapers she had been perusing and putting them into a pile. “You have only this week disgraced yourself in a phaeton race with Cyril Wright, beat my father to flinders in a mad game of chess, and sent Jalbert into spasms insisting that he include curry in the menu so you can practice for when you travel to India.”
Picking up a Belle Assemblée, Charlie flipped through it. “Should I go unprepared? Ramdas from the General’s house gave me several recipes and promised to secure the curry for me.”
“So, it’s India now? What happened to the Amazon?”
Charlie waved a small hand. “I stand a better chance of finding someone on their way to India. I shall not give up on the Amazon, however. In the meantime, I. Am. Bored.”
Georgie nodded and checked her questions one last time. “Let me get Geoffrey through Toulouse while we wait for Eddie.”
Charlie harrumphed. “You do know we have a perfectly good tutor who is supposed to be teaching these lessons.”
“He has enough strife just getting the boys through Greek and Latin and Mathematics. Besides, I find this fun.”
“You never found it fun before...”
Georgie grinned down at her work. “Before the very Colonel Greyville whom I am about to rescue from an ill-considered marriage, came to our attention?”
Charlie smiled down at the magazine she really wasn’t reading. “I assume you shall have to meet him,” she mused.
Georgie couldn’t deny that her pulse picked up a bit. She found herself wanting to smile. She couldn’t deny she’d been thinking a bit too much about her upcoming meeting with the Colonel. “He needs to find an alternate bride. I can help.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“Well, I don’t know yet. That is what the meeting will to be about.”
Charlie didn’t even look up. “Youcould marry him.”
